Books I Like

One of my favorite activities is to find good authors who have disappeared from bookshelves. This happens because they are no longer fashionable, or don't bring in money, or are simply crowded out by new writers. They rapidly go out of print. I hunt for them on the internet. Some are so rare I probably have the only copies around. Today I want to talk about Ruth Park, an Australian. I love Australian books and movies because they celebrate ordinary folk and are (usually) not sentimental. Think of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Some of the ugliest people I've ever seen are in that movie, including a truly repellent child -- and I wound up liking them.

Ruth Park is best known in the U. S. for Playing Beatie Bow, and in Australia for The Muddle-Headed Wombat and The Harp in the South. The latter was made into an excellent TV miniseries. When we lived in Australia a teacher gave my son Daniel a copy of The Muddle-Headed Wombat. This was because he was constantly getting into trouble (he was seven). He climbed trees, burrowed under fences, and told a teacher to leave the other kids and take him to a store. He wanted to buy a candy bar. He told everyone his mother was a Sioux Indian named Old Sugar and that I had driven a stake through the head of a trader I didn't like. He said I would come over and sort the teachers out if they weren't nice to him. I got some very strange looks when I showed up for the first parent/teacher meeting.

That was how I discovered Ruth Park and a fine writer she is, too. Right now I am reading her autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo. It's the sort of book that makes you feel good to be alive. I highly recommend it. Penguin published it in 1993 and it may still be around in some library.